


Now These Stories (Will Hold & Hide Your Name)

by ShadowsLament



Category: Peaky Blinders (TV)
Genre: 1001 Nights AU (Sorta-Very Loosely), Alfie follows Scheherazade's lead, M/M, POV Multiple, Stories within Stories
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-04-01
Updated: 2020-04-01
Packaged: 2021-03-01 04:02:29
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,715
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23428915
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ShadowsLament/pseuds/ShadowsLament
Summary: Anyone wanting to make a deal with the man who runs the Peaky Blinders empire must first agree to a particular arrangement: Entertain him with a different story every night, for thirteen nights, and the deal is done. Bore him and...“I heard it told that men who don’t live up to their half of this arrangement, they up and appear with slits for buttons that don’t serve no purpose on account of ‘em havin’ to be worninsidethe skin. They return to wherever the fuck it is they go on any given day sportin’ these slits or with a hole in the throat. Voices shot to shit. But that, now, that is when they turn up. Them that don’t, I gotta wonder if they fucked off to Wonderland with no head for that country’s fuckin’ delightful queen to take off. Is that what happened, Mister Shelby? Did you send those men down a rabbit hole?”Alfie Solomons is a natural born storyteller, and so he finds himself on Thomas Shelby's doorstep, not a single doubt in his mind that he'll live to see the morning of the fourteenth day.
Relationships: Tommy Shelby/Alfie Solomons
Comments: 8
Kudos: 16





	Now These Stories (Will Hold & Hide Your Name)

**Author's Note:**

> Let's talk for a moment about ambitious undertakings, because there is a wee section of my mind that insists I've bitten off more than I can chew with this, but it's more that I know the story is going to unfold in its own time and at its own pace. I sincerely hope you won't be put off by slow to come updates; I hope, in the end, the story will be worth the wait.

“Mister Solomons.” 

The cool breeze of an unsubtle early hour slit across Tommy’s throat where his shirt was unbuttoned and absent of its collar. Air scented with anise and rum, and an unlikely splinter of rotting timber, stirred at his hip. Half of an untucked hem rustled, slapped against his wrist as he extended a hand towards the man at his door. Gold bands met the calluses pinned like unwanted medals on the crest of Tommy’s palm, his skin absorbing a warmth he thought uncommon to metal. “Your telegram failed to mention when I might expect you.”

Alfie Solomons cocked his head. Maintained his steady hold on Tommy’s hand. “The breaking of bread,” he said in a quiet voice that seemed to rise from some fathomless depth, “now, that does happen more than once a day. I will give you that, Mister Shelby, I will acknowledge that truth like I would a passing dog. But from what I’ve heard about you, setting aside a truly inordinate amount of tutting over a frankly alarmin’ allergic-like approach to any and all kinds of solid sustenance, from what I heard about one Thomas fucking Shelby, I am inclined to believe you would’ve known to expect me exactly when I turned up.”

“A man assured of his welcome regardless of the hour would think so. That, or a superstitious one.” Taking back his hand, Tommy wondered at the tremors tracking up his arm, if they’d gained ground in his body even before he’d woken to a sound as deafening as mines blown open, blown so high only to fall short of kingdom come. 

A sound that might’ve been his own goddamned heartbeat. 

Or Solomons’ insistent knocking on his front fucking door. 

Rather than take the time to separate one pounding from another, Tommy had yanked on the clothes nearest to hand. On the first of the stairs’ landings, he managed a single button near the bottom of his shirt, to zip up his trousers without feeding his cock to its teeth. “If you’ve heard about me, you’ve heard about the arrangement that precedes a deal of the magnitude you’d be after. If you’re here, you’re—”

“Willing. I am willing,” Solomons nodded, and slanted his stare over Tommy’s shoulder, “to entertain your arrangement and, by extension, yourself.” The man’s gaze ebbed from the hall’s spacious channel, surged up to hold Tommy’s own. “The particulars to include ten nights—“

“Your car’s made a mess of my road, Mister Solomons.” Tommy nodded towards the ruts tunneled into the dirt, towards the rocks and displaced bits of rough-skinned bark thrown to either side of those craters. He skimmed over uprooted blades of grass scattered like broken bayonets, settled on Solomons’ hand absently tugging on strands of his beard. The man finally, slowly, turned to have a look, and Tommy forced his fingers to do the work. Button after button. Until his shirt was sealed, completely closed over a rash of residual tremors following tendon to muscle to bone. Until white thread and needle-thin blue stripes covered scars that had no fucking business still burning.

That task accomplished, Tommy said, “A baker’s dozen,” and cleared his throat to dislodge the muck or the gravel or whatever it was he had no goddamned recollection of swallowing but that thickened his voice. “Thirteen nights, thirteen stories.”

“This new and unheard of number, you’ve chosen it on account of my being an actual baker, that it? It seems fitting, does it?”

“If you don’t agree—“

“Consider that if I was to directly look at a pair of glaciers lashed in black, if I were to hold those eyes of yours, right, and say, _fuck off with that fucking ridiculous number, Mister Shelby_ , I would have to be standing in a territory ruled by principles. But it so happens that my preference,” Solomons splayed a wide, blunt-knuckled hand over one black lapel, “it is for Camden Town. It’s for my bakery, yeah, and the little office I have carved out therein. A dim room walled in by wood darker than dirt and filled with little doodads I have accumulated across many days. And beyond its door, my men scuttling between bread and barrel. Narrow, labyrinthine pathways where principles more often than fucking not go and get themselves lost.”

“Fine,” Tommy said after a moment, after a considering blink, “we’re agreed, then. Thirteen nights it is.” He reached for the door to shut it. “Until tonight, Mister Solomons.”

“Tigers and tails.” Solomons took a distance-closing step. “Wolves and ears.” A brilliant green glance spilled quicker than liquid from Tommy’s still eyes to the imperceptibly sharper line of his shoulders. The tap Solomons delivered with a fingertip to Tommy’s wrist, pale against the door’s dark varnish, was as light as any other figment. In broad daylight, Tommy had long since realized, imagination’s cloth could be folded. Forgotten at the back of a drawer. “Which of those two bloody beasts are you holdin’ onto, hmm, that you cannot conclude our business with the shaking of a hand?”

“We shook hands,” Tommy said, the words flat as the crown inked on Solomons’ skin, “when you arrived. It’s been done.”

“It has been, yes,” Solomons quietly agreed. He scratched his jaw, looked again at the pale shock of Tommy’s hand against the dark door, at the fall of hair Tommy felt like a fresh bruise across his forehead. “I’ll come back tonight, as agreed, but here I am, too late in realizin’ I might be well and truly fucked. ‘Cause it’s clear to me now that I’m borin’ you. I can see that, can’t I?” 

Tommy held to his own silence, and waited, listening to a blackcap whistle to pull the world from the tight shafts of dreams.

“I heard it told that men who don’t live up to their half of this arrangement, they up and appear with slits for buttons that don’t serve no purpose on account of ‘em havin’ to be worn inside the skin. They return to wherever the fuck it is they go on any given day sportin’ these slits or with a hole in the throat. Voices shot to shit. But that, now, that is when they turn up. Them that don’t, I gotta wonder if they fucked off to Wonderland with no head for that country’s fuckin’ delightful queen to take off. Is that what happened, Mister Shelby? Did you send those men down a rabbit hole?”

“As much as you’ve heard about me, my business, I think you already have your answer.”

Solomons’ smile was slow to catch, but catch it did, flaring into a bright laugh. “I’ll tell you fuckin’ what, Thomas, your thirteen nights will come and go, and the morning after the last you’ll look at your knees and wonder what they’re there for if not to kneel for me.” 

His jaw tightening, Tommy lifted his eyes to the sky’s blank canvas. The picture his mind’s eye had held onto down all the goddamned stairs shifted from a bloody age spent on his knees beneath no man’s land, rubber tubing dripping from his ears and carrying back every single solitary sound, to looking up the anchor line of Solomons’ solid body. Seeing himself reflected in the open, devouring water of the man’s eyes. In the slick on Solomons’ lips. There was no point denying the view was infinitely better, but what were the odds, Tommy wondered, of it coming at a similarly steep cost. 

Quietly, to the black wool stretched across the back of muscle-plated shoulders, he said, “Quite full of yourself, aren’t you, Mister Solomons.”

“That is as may be, and with good fucking reason,” Solomons said, opening the door on the unoccupied side of his car, “but keep in mind that when the right mood persuades me to it, mine is a generous nature. I’ll give you an example, how’s that? Let’s say you were to ask me in somethin’ like polite and pleasing tones to fill you instead. I would do that for you, I would. With immense fucking pleasure.” The man’s brimstone smile was obscured by the glare of sunlight repelled by the windscreen’s glass, but Tommy had its shape, saw it still. “Until tonight, Mister Shelby.” 

He didn’t return Solomons’ parting wave, or take his eyes off the car until it became another low-flying red-breasted bird in the distance.

“Who the fuck was that?”

Tommy shut the door. “Good morning, Arthur.”

“Haven’t decided that yet, have I.” Arthur stabbed a finger in the general direction of the doorknob. “Who—”

“Alfie Solomons.” Headed for the stairs and a change into more suitable clothing, Tommy paused by his brother’s side. “Forget the fucking war, you’d have not a hope in hell of winning a skirmish against that man. So for however long Solomons lasts, be it one night or ten, you’ll keep your hands stowed away, safe and sound in your pockets. Understand?”

“If he starts something, I’ll be fucked if—“

“Yes,” Tommy crossed the polished floor, “you will be.” On his way up, he called down, “There are payments to be collected. Get on with it.”

* * * *

Alfie lagged in Thomas Shelby’s well-tailored wake, had a look in rooms that were a great fucking deal larger than cabinets but contained curiosities all the same. 

The unlamented dead, limp-looking pricks half-strangled by their cravats, stared back from every wall. Types like that, they would go and install in their place of residence tables so delicate they were each good for the holding of one thing and one thing only, be it a pretty little pointless box or a vase forced to bear its flowers beneath glazing poured over fine porcelain skin. Between the shapely legs of one tall walnut beauty, winking some kind of code to spite the day’s faded light, was a silver pen that on a guess had last tasted ink many, many years prior.

There were more chairs and brown leather chesterfields than could likely be found in all of London’s shops, patterned pillows, short lamps, long lamps, bloody useless clocks, and if the man ahead of him saw one odd or one end in any of the rooms they passed, Alfie would force fucking feed it to Ollie.

“This a house,” Alfie proceeded Tommy into a room to rival Carlyle’s library, “or Charybdis dragged well inland and dressed up in a fancy coat of brick?” He gestured with his hat towards the open doorway. “There was a hatstand back there in the parlor I’m fairly certain was bones strapped into shape by pearly ligaments.” Pointed the brim down to the hand-knotted Persian on the floor. “All these fucking rugs, maybe one of ‘em’s been tossed over a whirlpool, hmm?”

“The estate agent didn’t include that feature on the papers. You get sucked into one you’ll have to take it up with him.” Tommy rounded a desk bearing more items than any other flat surface found on the first floor. With a hand far steadier than Alfie intimately recalled it being that morning, he reached for a box of cigarettes and the depleted matchbook beside it. “You’re as safe here, Mister Solomons, as you are anywhere.”

“That bein’ how it is, consider me not at all comforted.” Wandering over to an abundance of long green fronds, Alfie again lifted his hat, applied it to parting a few yellowed tips, to exposing more lanky stems. “I knew a man who hired another man to stand behind a potted plant just like this.”

Smoke not unlike a crooked finger slipped from Tommy’s mouth. “All right, I’ll bite,” he said, and did, setting his teeth on the curve of that blood-flushed lower lip. Scraping tender skin without bothering to offer his guest the first taste. “And why’d he do that?”

“The lack of specificity in that question, Thomas, it’s beneath you.” 

Alfie put down his hat, did as that curl of smoke bade him to do and walked closer to a man with Erebus’ mark all over him: along the dark lash of hair across his forehead, in the shallows beneath those Arctic eyes, tucked into more hollows than Alfie had seen since he’d done his part to blast a few into Belgian ground. It was there on that uncanny face, it was, and in the shadow-shade of the wool holdin’ the body, lean and straight as a doomed ship’s mast. 

From where he stood framed by an outsized window, centered as he was in a pane of glass thinner than ice, Tommy cocked an inquiring eyebrow.

Acknowledging that minute display of curiosity with a nod, Alfie continued, “There’re two men in this scenario, ain’t there. Both loosely in possession of their reasons. One man’s set, now, those had been cultivated over time, at the bottom of several quality bottles. While the other one, his—Nah,” he shook his head, “it’s another day’s story, that. Not on for tonight’s assignation with insomnia.”

Tommy’s eyebrow, Alfie saw, was apparently going to be put through its paces that evening. “Insomnia?”

“You’re asking, I presume,” Alfie stripped off his overcoat, turned the lapels in and draped its weight over the arm of a white wingback chair, “because the word does imply the Sandman simply fucked off, nothin’ to be done about it.” Rather than share a chair with an article of clothing, and, what, with there being plenty others scattered across the room’s expansive geography like fucking drawing pins stuck in a map, Alfie selected a sofa smoothly upholstered in blushing velvet. “Only you do seem the type, Thomas, to take that cap of yours to the skull of any man or myth foolish enough to come ‘round your bedroom in the middle of the fucking night with a bag of sand in hand and two umbrellas under the other arm. 

My guess, if I was about to hazard such a thing,” Alfie said, putting his back against one of three pillows, “would be that you, you opt to toss that right fucking awful, sand-slinging creature out of your door whenever he has the temerity to show his face.”

Flecking a tray with ash, staring down some fixed point over Alfie’s shoulder, Tommy murmured, “That brings the count to three.” He shifted his glance, slow as an ice floe. “Three times you’ve called me Thomas.”

“The problem here being that you prefer Tommy. Right,” Alfie said, “I’ve made a note of it. All this time we’ve now spent together, you’ve caught on, haven’t you, that where you’re concerned, I’m Alfie. You should be writing down, yeah, that Mister Solomons won’t fucking do.” 

“No need to waste the paper, Alfie. I’ll remember.” 

Tommy lifted the cut crystal decanter stationed at the closest corner of the desk. The liquor, what fucking little remained of it, was honey-hued. Alfie hadn’t in his life known the stuff to play that sweet with a man’s tongue; never known it to smell like a garden burstin’ with fucking flowers, not before or since noses came back from foreign fields clogged with trench mud and blood, with piss and the ash shit out of every conceivable crevice. 

Still with a firm hold on the decanter, Tommy tipped it slightly towards a second glass. “Drink?”

“Can’t say it’s one of my habits, no.”

Alfie watched Tommy’s sure hand take up the generous portion poured out, and idly turning the rings he wore on his own, said, “There is a village, a very small village, sittin’ on frostbitten land in a country far north of our little rain-whipped island. This land, its coastline, would you believe it could be seen in the shape of a question mark. It was the water, see, that made it take this perplexin’ shape. The sea shrugged, it heaved, it fucking pushed. Yeah, it did, once upon a time. And much later on, right there on the rocky shore inside the hook, the sea did deposit a man with a fucking peculiar condition. It—”

Frowning, yanking the pillow out from behind his back, Alfie tossed the goddamned thing into the fireplace’s darkly gaping mouth. He adjusted his lean, settling into an unobstructed sightline, and caught Tommy with a smile flittin’ like some small bird around his whiskey-wet lips.

“What condition would that be, Alfie?”

“Yeah, all right,” Alfie said, and began the process of folding the worn-soft cloth of both sleeves over his forearms, “hold your fuckin’ horses.” It might’ve been the gold at his wrist that drew Tommy’s eye, the bracelet’s links he was intent on counting. Certainly that bit of jewelry could’ve been the thing his gaze coveted, why it didn’t shift a smidge from those inches of revealed skin, not until Alfie added, “I hear you’re good at that, any way the phrase might turn.” 

Tommy’s jaw clenched, released. 

To forestall the return volley of the man’s cold, clever voice, Alfie held up a placating hand. “But that is neither here nor there, and our destination has already been determined. In that northernmost village, on one of those rare mild mornings in mid-January, our man Arley Absal—”

“Arley. Isn’t that the property—”

“Listen, mate, if you’re going to be interruptin’—“

“It was the pillow that did as much,” Tommy said, and as his eyes sought out the fucking thing in the fireplace, a bit of sunlight shone through that barrier of ice, “the first time.”

“And for that fucking show of rudeness it was banished. Thrown over the threshold of one of Hell’s many open doorways.”

“Hell, is it? Well if that’s the case, the maid’ll be comin’ ‘round after retrieving it, asking me for an increase in wages.”

“Deserves it, doesn’t she, for workin’ in an obviously peckish place that could any day swallow her whole.” His hands folded in a loose knot against his stomach, Alfie raised his own eyebrow. “You ready to listen to this story now or fucking what?”

Tommy swallowed a mouthful of whiskey. “All ears.”

“Right, then. It was when Arley was still just a boy, really, that his condition manifested.” Alfie kept his voice soft as a distantly remembered lullaby, the kind of quiet that wouldn’t leave Tommy much choice but to ease forward, to lean closer, if it was every word he wanted. “In those very early days, Arley was as likely as not to confuse his mother with the wash she brought in, and you’ve got to see how he might. His mum being overall pale, exhaustion set on her young face in lines like half a dozen wrinkles, and with all these fucking stains on her skin, marks left by the men who came for their clothing.”

Trading the look of a tight and tidy row of books for the sight of Tommy’s lips, pressed into a hardened line, Alfie stroked his beard. “I’ll ask you this, Tom, keepin’ in mind that he watched his mother fold in and fold down, saw her be used and beaten like a rug put over the drying line, day after fucking day, can that little boy be blamed for having a hard time separating the woman from the wash?”

Tommy’s answer was a low hummed note. A flicker of long black lashes. 

“Whatever the fuck you or I might think, blame himself he fucking did, sittin’ there on the floor in a tempest of bed sheets and shirts, trousers and the like, his heart beating, yeah, relentlessly pounding, deafenin’ his ears while he watched, and watched some more.” Alfie paused, held up a finger. “Until one blood-spattered afternoon. On that particular day, he could not make out a goddamned thing. Not a single wall papered in soap residue. And though he looked and searched for it, not the little breakable figure of a bright white Borzoi. His mum’s most precious possession, that pretty porcelain dog was, after Arley himself. He could not see a fuckin’ thing due to their room having filled with fog.”

Alfie indicated the window at Tommy’s back with a pointed look. “There were two of those in their room, the glass grimy with fingerprints, grimy because attempts had been made but those windows would not be cracked open. And so it wasn’t from outside that this impenetrable fog stole in.”

“No, it wasn’t.” As Alfie got his feet beneath him, he considered the number of hours Tommy might’ve spent beneath the cream sheet of the ceiling, attempting to make sense of the nonsense in bas-relief someone saw fit to put up there. After picturing Tommy’s dark head tipped against the tufted back of the chair, after unloosing his thoughts from the hook of Tommy’s jaw held at that sharp angle, Alfie walked slowly and deliberately towards the door. “Where’s the kitchen, then?”

“The kitchen.”

“Yeah,” Alfie repeated, “the kitchen. The place where, presumably, the kettle is kept. You can’t rightly expect a man to talk hours on end without somethin’ warm and wet to lubricate the throat and keep the cords in working order, can you. Point the way, Tommy, I won’t be more than a moment.”

Funny, how Tommy’s gaze turned up to the ceiling. How it only came back down, Alfie assumed, after determining that whatever answer he went looking for, it wasn’t about to be found in an embarrassment of flourishes and fucking curlicues.

A thimbleful of whiskey remained in Tommy’s glass; he knocked that back, replaced the tumbler. Sliding into something like a grin, exposing a dimple—or the indecent hint of one—Tommy stood. “What kind of host would let his guest wander out on his own to be swallowed up by the sea monster under the floorboards?” 

Alfie held his spot near a small table topped by a pair of horn-rimmed spectacles and that day’s papers, folded in thirds, as Tommy crossed the distance between them. The man passed by so close, Alfie felt smoke like a phantom’s finger laid down where his skin was bare, felt his tongue hold onto liquor like the muscle was a shallow well, though he fucking knew, didn’t he, that there wasn’t so much as a drop of spit there. Tommy’s scent extended further to some stretch of ground favored by horses and brutally cold rain, a near-silent place where gun oil beaded over puddles, and—

“Alfie?”

“Hmm?” Alfie hummed, and blinked, and noticed Tommy standing still in the doorway. “What’s the fucking hold up?”

“You’ll need to tell me.” Tommy moved into the hallway only when Alfie was near enough to follow in footsteps that sounded like muffled shots. He glanced over his shoulder, eyes burning in the dim, through the fallen dark. Lighting the way into the depths of the house. “Though I’d prefer you told me about the fog.”

“The fog,” Alfie muttered, taking a split second to orient himself within the moonlit kitchen, to spot the kettle and the sink, and make for one before the other. “Arley would not grasp it right then, that the fog was of his own making. It would be years, Tommy, very many years before it was determined one of his heart’s chambers was furiously fomenting it. The thing would beat irregularly, see, and move the fog through bodily systems that didn’t know what to do with the fucking stuff except expel it. Force it out through nostrils, Arley’s open mouth.” 

While the water boiled, Alfie took down a pot and two cups, fetched a strainer and a tin of tea leaves. Peripherally, he saw Tommy pull back a spindle chair from a battered table, saw legs as striking as pistol barrels cross after Tommy’d claimed the seat. One hand—the left, with the flash of silver curved round its littlest finger—came to rest on a bent knee covered in costly wool.

“It was fuckin’ understandable, his mum bein’ scared witless by it, but Arley was painfully young, just a small boy with scrapes on both palms and his two knees, and he did not know it wasn’t himself that terrified her.” Alfie poured water from the pot over the strainer balancing on the cup’s rim—the one meant for Tommy first, then his own—and when it was done, tea made, brought both cups to the table. “Drink that,” he said, “I can’t abide good tea goin’ to waste. That type of shit behavior has no place in my home.”

Tommy traced the rounded interior of the cup’s handle with a fingertip. “This isn’t your home, Alfie.”

“Ain’t yours either, mate. Not really, not as I can tell.” Alfie ignored Tommy’s narrowed stare to have his first taste of the tea, and there, he thought, were the flowers: lovely blue cornflowers, and a lemon’s bright bite. “Arley’s formative years were marked by fists and kicks to the ribs. His mum’s shaking hands on gashes and bruises she could not see through the fog. Insult to injury, literally speaking, the two of ‘em were constantly bangin’ into their dinner table, cracking a shin on the end of the bed, smacking into walls and open cupboard doors. Knockin’ over the wash water. Fuckin’ awful, the whole of it, but most of all the sound of his mum sobbin’ through the night’s long silence.”

“His fault,” Tommy murmured, the thinnest thread of a sound, one Alfie was positively certain Tommy himself didn’t hear. In a similarly absent state, Tommy reached for and picked up his cup, took a deep sip that left a slight sheen on those lips. The brew seemed to bring him around: no sooner did his eyes lift from the table, the leftover flavor licked from the corners of his mouth, did he softly demand to know, “What did he do?”

“About the only thing he could.” Alfie palmed the cup, his rings chiming against the china. “He left. Without a spoken word. No note. Figured the absence of his fog would be all his mum needed to know he’d gone, and for fucking good.”

“Gone,” Tommy said, “to the village?”

“Nah, not straight off. He took up the life of a tramp. Or a gypsy.” Alfie winked at the man across the table, and it was something to see: the expression etched on Tommy’s face, what looked to be a hybrid of exasperation and honest amusement. “Walked all over, wanderin’ wherever he pleased, he did that for years. ‘Cause the thing was, Tom, there wasn’t nowhere he could stay. He did know he wasn’t welcome in any home or boarding house perched on the roads runnin’ through the places he found. The stones thrown said as much as the insults, the bloody loud jeering. Finally, right, after ending another fight he didn’t start, the wind cut through the fog he brought with him everywhere and pushed him towards the sea.”

“To the north.”

“There, you’ve gone and caught on,” Alfie said, momentarily regretting the decision to move to the kitchen as the wooden seat beneath him took on the properties of a boulder, one of them spotted puddingstones sittin’ on the Thames’ foreshore. Shifting to appease the snarling muscles in his lower back, a thread bound in one sleeve snagged on a splinter that then pricked his elbow. “Fuck’s sake.”

“There’re bandages in the—“

“ _Ban_ —Fuck off with that.”

“I could probably put hands on a needle and spool of thread if—“

“Tommy,” Alfie said, “I’m going to put my own hands on a fucking gun and fucking shoot you.”

From behind his teacup, through a slight, gilt-edged smile, Tommy said, “Finish the story before you give that a try.”

“If you insist,” Alfie allowed. “So, after Arley arrived in the village, he wandered here and there to get the lay of the land and to gauge the temperature of its people. As you undoubtedly suspect, Tommy, the latter was freezing, absolutely fucking frigid. But it was like the cold had crystallized in their throats, because not a single voice penetrated the fog. Not then, least ways, and it was their astonishing silence that moved Arley into an abandoned shack down on the remote dot that finished off the coastline’s question mark.”

Alfie left the dregs of his tea to the cup, and finding himself in the Arctic of Tommy’s watchful eyes, said, “But let us move forward a bit, all right, to when his story properly begins.”

**Author's Note:**

> If you chose to read this, thank you. And for your patience and willingness to wait for the next bit, thank you. I hope you found this first chapter enjoyable!


End file.
